Living What I Write, Part I

April 3, 2015

My wife was crouched at the base of Play Actor's mast during a violent squall. She was flattening our mainsail to de-power it for the high winds when there was a crack like a rifle shot and she fell backward to the wildly pitching deck. Her harness and tether kept her from going overboard, and before I could lash the helm and go to her aid, she recovered. A piece of hardware in the boom vang, the block and tackle she was using, had parted. The stainless steel had grown brittle with age. She collected the pieces and brought them back to show me.

"Now what?" she asked over the howl of the wind in the rigging.

"We either need to reef the main or drop it," I said.

It was dawn when the squall struck. We had been trading off during the night, changing watch every four hours, and after a clear, moonlit night, we were taken by surprise. With the full mainsail flying, we were overpowered as the wind piped up into the mid-30-knot range. It wasn't dangerous, at least not yet, but it was a long way from the benign sail that we'd enjoyed through the night, and we still had several hours to go before our planned landfall in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.

We left St. Martin late the previous afternoon and experienced one of those aesthetic treats reserved for offshore sailors. We were out of sight of land when the sun set. There was a green flash, a rare enough phenomenon, but this one occurred as the disc of the sun sunk below the top of the clouds on the horizon. In our years sailing the tropics, we've seen our share of green flashes, but never one that happened when clouds obscured the horizon. For a moment, the clouds were glowing green, but I've never managed to get a photograph of a green flash.

As the sun's golden glow faded from the indigo water, the moon rose off our stern. It was a waxing moon, a day or two before full, and the sky behind us to the east was clear. As the reddish-gold highlights of sunset faded, our world turned black and white and silver. Except for two whales that breached nearby just before sunset and two cruise ships that passed us just after, we had no other company.

We spent the night sailing, in awe of our surroundings. Sailing itself is magic; harnessing the power of a steady, gentle breeze to move a boat that weighs tens of tons through such an ethereal setting is transcendent. For that night, we were the only two people in the world, and what a world it was.

The sea at night, far from land, has always been our special place, but that night will stay in our memory as one of our best. It ended as dramatically as it had begun; as the moon set off our bow, the sun rose behind us, turning shades of gray with silver highlights to dazzling flashes of gold.

Although it had been a clear night, we had a few brief, misty rain showers. They barely wet the deck, the eerie diffusion of light through the moisture-laden air adding to the sense of otherworldliness. And then, as the golden sunrise became daylight, the light northeasterly wind bought the squall. At first, we thought it was another shower, until the wind piped up.

Thirty plus knots of wind isn't rare offshore. We've sailed in that kind of wind for days at a time. This morning, though, we were tired. We had set out on a single overnight passage to begin a journey that will span the next couple of months. We had not yet settled into the rhythm of watch-keeping, so neither of us had slept during our off watches.  We were tired, ready to drop the anchor and get some rest.

We could see St. John looming on the horizon through the breaks in the rain. We looked at each other, deciding whether to reduce the size of the mainsail with a reef, or just take it down. Reefing was more work, but we could keep sailing. Taking it down meant running the auxiliary engine. Looking at Leslie and raising my eyebrows, I reached for the ignition key. She nodded her agreement.

Leslie took the helm and pointed the bow into the wind, revving up the diesel, while I went forward and dropped the mainsail, wrestling the hundreds of square feet of wet, slippery sailcloth into submission and lashing it to the boom. Working one-handed, I held on to keep from being knocked down by the gyrations of Play Actor as she smashed into the waves, wind-driven spray flying, soaking me.


I'm writing this as we sit in a calm anchorage a few yards off a pristine beach south of Caneel Bay, St. John. We've already forgotten the bruises and the sore muscles. They're a small price to pay for what we had last night.
We’re taking Play Actor back to the States for the first time since 2004. It’s good to be making an extended trip for a change as opposed to the short hops between islands that we’ve done for the last ten years.

There will be more posts like this one as we refresh our acquaintance with voyaging under sail, and I expect they’ll form the basis of a third non-fiction book to complement my sailing thrillers.

It's been a Samuel Johnson Year

An Omar Khayaam day in the Bahamas a few years ago

Samuel Johnson said, “A man who would go to sea for pleasure would go to Hell for a pastime.” Then there's Omar Khayaam: “The Good Lord does not subtract from a man's allotted time those hours spent sailing.”

Being a lifelong boater, I've heard variations of those ideas for as long as I can remember. For some reason, I had never juxtaposed them before. I've enjoyed them both, depending on my mood of the moment, but I just stumbled across the irony in pairing them. If both are correct, then considering the percentage of my life spent afloat, I'll be living in hell long after my contemporaries have moved on.

I don't always find Samuel Johnson's sentiment to be accurate. Obviously, unless I were a masochist, I wouldn't chose to live as I do if I found going to sea as bad as he thought it was. Neither do I cling to the hope that Omar Khayaam was right. On the good days, I find his idea attractive, but there are those days when I think Samuel Johnson might not be wrong. Fortunately, those days are few, although sometimes they come in bunches, like bananas in the tropics.

Lately, we've been forced to spend more of our time working on the boat than we would like. Boats, like most things, are a complex web of compromises. Small boats provide cramped living space, but they're relatively easy to handle and maintain. Big boats are roomier, but they're more demanding to handle and geometrically more expensive to keep.

Being traditionalists, we find older boats more appealing aesthetically than newer ones, and in general more comfortable and seaworthy in rough weather. Their design and construction have stood the tests of time and use. Older boats are also more maintenance intensive, and they don't offer as much open living space as newer designs. There are many more dimensions for comparison, and traditional versus modern is a popular topic for debate among sailors everywhere. The 'best' boat is the one that makes your heart race; there's no right answer to the question of which boat is best.

Living with your choice for an extended period does make you conscious of the trade offs, though. Our boat is 35 years old this year, and we've owned her for 26 if those years. We're intimately acquainted with her good points and her shortcomings, and there aren't many things about her that we'd change. She's been a dependable and mostly trouble-free vessel, but every so often, a lot of things seem to wear out at once.

This season has been one of those times when Play Actor has been a demanding mistress instead of an uplifting, exciting paramour. We knew we were going to have to buy her a new mainsail this year, but we had not expected to have to build her a new bowsprit. We had planned on reupholstering her interior, but we hadn't reckoned on spending days getting rid of an infestation of termites. We knew it was time to preemptively re-caulk a lot of the hardware mounted on deck, but we had not expected that some of it had already leaked over a long enough period to rot parts of the deck.

For most of this winter, we've been in a Samuel Johnson frame of mind, so we're grateful for Omar Khayaam's encouraging view. Thanks to him, we know that we're going to have plenty of time in the future to enjoy the fruits of this year's labor.

EBooks and Life Aboard a Sailboat, or Sail Faster, Read eBooks

We got interested in eBooks early on, because they take up no space and they are available anywhere there is internet service.  Both of those features are important to us.  Leslie was the early adopter; she started reading eBooks on a Windows CE handheld computer using Microsoft Reader, years ago.  Her choices were somewhat limited in the early days.  Most of the books available were out-of-copyright classics, which had some appeal.  She also found a few reference books, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica for the pocket PC.  Her breakthrough occurred about three years ago, when she discovered that she could find a recently published novel that she wanted in eBook format for immediate download.  It required downloading different reader software, but that was a trivial problem.  Given that we were down in the southeastern Caribbean, where bookstores are scarce, she was pretty excited.  It was possible to order a paper copy of the book in question from any of a number of online retailers, but shipping would have been expensive, plus there would have been the aggravation of clearing the package through customs and paying duty, as well.  The eBook price was slightly less expensive than a paper copy, but the total cost was a fraction of what the paper book would have cost us, and she had the book and was reading it within a few minutes. 

We now have a library of around a thousand eBooks, growing daily, stored on a notebook computer and managed with a great program called Calibre.  These days, we read eBooks on our iPod Touches.  Leslie was the pioneer again.  Her handheld PC died two years ago, and we replaced it with an iPod Touch.  It's an amazing device.  Although reading eBooks on the older device was convenient, switching to reading on an iPod Touch meant that she could read a book using one hand.  Once she got the iPod, she quit reading paper books.  I couldn’t understand it. 

When I got involved in planning to replace Play Actor's engine, I borrowed the iPod and downloaded a project-planning application, which really opened my eyes.  At the first chance, I got my own iPod Touch, and I’ve never looked back.  I have an entire reference library on it.  It now holds everything from novels to dictionaries of several languages to the entire Wikipedia database, offline, plus the workshop and parts manuals for everything on the boat, including our new diesel engine.  It also handles spreadsheet files for our budget, and stores all of our recipes and shopping information, as well as serving such mundane functions as a clock and calendar.  But, I digress.  I was writing about eBooks and their impact on our life under sail.  Perhaps I'll do another post about how computers and related technology have affected us in recent years. 

Reading eBooks on such a versatile platform has changed the way we read.  If we happen upon an unfamiliar reference, it's become intuitive to shift from the book in question to one of the many reference works that reside on the iPod, satisfy our curiosity, and go back to the book, all seamlessly.  While it is possible to do that with paper books, it is enough more cumbersome, especially on the boat, where books must be stored in every available cranny, that we didn't often do it.  Thoughts and ideas that are stimulated by whatever we are reading are easily captured in a similar manner.  We can copy from the text and paste to a notepad or to-do list, or make a note in our handwriting on the screen.  Annotation of what we're reading, and the sharing of the annotations, is equally easy.  That significantly increases our reading pleasure, as we interrupt one another much less often to share our observations.  In a paper book world, contemporaneous observations were usually not recorded, and so were often forgotten before they were discussed. 

The contribution of the iPod to my efficiency as a writer is tremendous.  Some of my best ideas pop into my mind while I'm reading, often when I'm reading something unrelated to my current writing project.  It's easy to capture those thoughts on the fly, without completely losing track of what I'm reading, but that's a topic for my writer's blog. 

The other major impact of eBooks on our life afloat has been in the area of boat speed.  We've taken a few hundred pounds of reference books off the boat in the past year, not to mention drastically reducing the number of paperback novels aboard.  We've come up a bit on our waterline.  We used to plan our cruising to some extent based on stopping in places where we knew we could find good book swaps.  That's no longer an issue.  We have internet service available almost everywhere, so we can add to our library anywhere we wish, without worrying about where we'll put the books. 

There are other benefits, as well, such as the freedom to read anywhere we're comfortable, without worrying about lighting.  Reading in bed is possible without disturbing your bedmate.  Some of the benefits are specific to the platform we've chosen, but a dedicated eBook reader, such as a Kindle or a Nook, would offer the freedom from bookstores and the space savings, at a minimum.  Some of our cruising acquaintances like the screens of the dedicated readers better, too. 

What's your experience with eBooks aboard?